The Supreme Court (SC) dismissed a PIL seeking a SIT probe into allegations of electoral roll manipulation levelled by Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi in Bengaluru Central and other constituencies.
A Bench of Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi stated that the petitioner may pursue the matter before the Election Commission of India. The bench ordered, ‘We have heard the petitioner's counsel. We are not inclined to entertain the petition, which is purportedly filed in public interest. The petitioner may pursue before ECI, if so advised’.
Counsel for the petitioner, Rohit Pandey, who is a practising advocate, said that they have already filed the representation with the poll panel but it has not been accepted. The petition urged the top court to stop further revision or finalisation of electoral rolls be undertaken by the Election Commission until an independent audit of the rolls was done and the court's directions were complied with. The petition sought directions to the ECI to publish electoral rolls in accessible, machine-readable and OCR-compliant formats to enable meaningful verification, audit and public scrutiny.
The plea refers to a press conference held on August 7 by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in which he made explosive claims of a ‘huge criminal fraud’ in polls through collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission, and termed it ‘vote theft’. He had cited an analysis of voter rolls in a constituency in Karnataka last year.
The PIL also alleged that in Maharashtra, after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and prior to the Assembly elections, within a span of around four months, about 39 lakh new voters were added to the electoral rolls against merely around 50 lakh voters added in the preceding five years. It added, ‘Such a sudden and disproportionate increase raises a serious question on the transparency of the Election Commission in the process of adding names to the voter list’.
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